The undead overground
2018-07-12 00:21The usual: I am heading into a major convention in a state of extreme physical exhaustion and emotional-intellectual despair. I spent nearly my entire day doing laundry and working. The combination always makes me feel like Boober. I am worried about several of my panels. That doesn't help.
I am fascinated by reports of the heat wave in the UK revealing old lines of ancient and medieval earthworks like a letter in lemon-juice ink or a developing photograph. Or in the words of Louise Barker, archaeologist on the scene, "It's like a painting that comes out into the fieldscapes." I thought at once of "The Land," which told me that Kipling must have seen cropmarks in just this field-crisping heat: "And in drouthy middle August, when the bones of meadows show, / We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago." Colpeper would have loved them, these tangible traces of resurfacing time. Sapphire and Steel, I suspect, would have done their particular metaphysical equivalent of sighing and rolling up their sleeves.
I am also delighted by the discovery that all you need to recover the image from a daguerreotype too badly corroded to yield much—if anything—to the naked eye is a synchrotron. Specifically a synchroton capable of mapping the distribution of mercury particles on the silver-coated copper plate, but if you can get one of those, then like Madalena Kozachuk and her colleagues at the University of Western Ontario you're in business. I can't imagine Sapphire and Steel will be thrilled about this development, either.
I resigned myself last summer to the fact that most of the discoveries which give me joy are the kind that give Elements grief. I write ghost poems. I like when the past turns up like a lost but not necessarily bad penny. They probably think I have a deathwish.
Case in point: I had never heard of Bouena Sarfatty before I ran into the relevant page of Literature of the Holocaust (2013) ed. Alan Rosen, but now I am going to do my best to get hold of her work:
Poetry and song were always crucial elements in Balkan Sephardic culture, and Bouena Sarfatty (a defiant poet-partisan) began composing under the first Nazi blows, even as starvation and confinement in a ghetto prior to deportation affected the Salonikan community. Employing the traditional genre of satirical rhyming komplas or koplas (couplets), she composed a song about Hitler and Pharaoh, and a parody of the biblical Book of Esther, which tells of a holocaust averted. A kompla about Passover in the ghetto on the eve of deportation goes: "Elijah began to sing, everyone began to cry; the kantigas continued by cursing Hitler . . ." Indeed, she specialized in cataloguing curses (collecting some four hundred), invoking humor, and weaving in proverbs. Alone among Sephardic women, she composed a long epic poem of komplas describing the destruction of the Jewish community of Salonika. Such compositions are the modern expression of a venerable narrative tradition going back to Iberia.
Her biography at the Jewish Women's Archive refers to her "sewing and embroidery talents of the highest order . . . a master of needlepoint and a feisty survivor-partisan-heroine of the decimated but once vibrant Salonikan Jewry." Her trousseau included tapestries. I love that she wove in all the Greek senses, poetry, textiles, lies, like Penelope whom everyone seems to forget practiced like a boss the craft of Athene, the grey-eyed unsexual goddess who loved a complicated man and must have loved the tricky woman he returned to, both of them clever weavers after her own heart. I hope Sarfatty had a worthy Odysseus. The JWA says that Max Garfinkle founded a kibbutz—and left it when she couldn't live there—so maybe he was the one with the olive tree. The trick (this is mine) is never to lose sight of the real lives under the likeness of myth. Like a rayograph of hillforts, like tenacious quicksilver, the people are always there.
I am fascinated by reports of the heat wave in the UK revealing old lines of ancient and medieval earthworks like a letter in lemon-juice ink or a developing photograph. Or in the words of Louise Barker, archaeologist on the scene, "It's like a painting that comes out into the fieldscapes." I thought at once of "The Land," which told me that Kipling must have seen cropmarks in just this field-crisping heat: "And in drouthy middle August, when the bones of meadows show, / We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago." Colpeper would have loved them, these tangible traces of resurfacing time. Sapphire and Steel, I suspect, would have done their particular metaphysical equivalent of sighing and rolling up their sleeves.
I am also delighted by the discovery that all you need to recover the image from a daguerreotype too badly corroded to yield much—if anything—to the naked eye is a synchrotron. Specifically a synchroton capable of mapping the distribution of mercury particles on the silver-coated copper plate, but if you can get one of those, then like Madalena Kozachuk and her colleagues at the University of Western Ontario you're in business. I can't imagine Sapphire and Steel will be thrilled about this development, either.
I resigned myself last summer to the fact that most of the discoveries which give me joy are the kind that give Elements grief. I write ghost poems. I like when the past turns up like a lost but not necessarily bad penny. They probably think I have a deathwish.
Case in point: I had never heard of Bouena Sarfatty before I ran into the relevant page of Literature of the Holocaust (2013) ed. Alan Rosen, but now I am going to do my best to get hold of her work:
Poetry and song were always crucial elements in Balkan Sephardic culture, and Bouena Sarfatty (a defiant poet-partisan) began composing under the first Nazi blows, even as starvation and confinement in a ghetto prior to deportation affected the Salonikan community. Employing the traditional genre of satirical rhyming komplas or koplas (couplets), she composed a song about Hitler and Pharaoh, and a parody of the biblical Book of Esther, which tells of a holocaust averted. A kompla about Passover in the ghetto on the eve of deportation goes: "Elijah began to sing, everyone began to cry; the kantigas continued by cursing Hitler . . ." Indeed, she specialized in cataloguing curses (collecting some four hundred), invoking humor, and weaving in proverbs. Alone among Sephardic women, she composed a long epic poem of komplas describing the destruction of the Jewish community of Salonika. Such compositions are the modern expression of a venerable narrative tradition going back to Iberia.
Her biography at the Jewish Women's Archive refers to her "sewing and embroidery talents of the highest order . . . a master of needlepoint and a feisty survivor-partisan-heroine of the decimated but once vibrant Salonikan Jewry." Her trousseau included tapestries. I love that she wove in all the Greek senses, poetry, textiles, lies, like Penelope whom everyone seems to forget practiced like a boss the craft of Athene, the grey-eyed unsexual goddess who loved a complicated man and must have loved the tricky woman he returned to, both of them clever weavers after her own heart. I hope Sarfatty had a worthy Odysseus. The JWA says that Max Garfinkle founded a kibbutz—and left it when she couldn't live there—so maybe he was the one with the olive tree. The trick (this is mine) is never to lose sight of the real lives under the likeness of myth. Like a rayograph of hillforts, like tenacious quicksilver, the people are always there.
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